Why Genuine Happiness Is Not An Accident
Tripping over your rug… that’s an accident.
Not paying complete attention on the road and lightly rear-ending someone while driving... also an accident.
Being born as a result of two 20 something practical strangers having sex one night... definitely an accident.
Genuine happiness, however, is not an accident. And here’s why.
Becoming genuinely happy requires addressing some of the very things that make us unhappy.
What are those three things?
Your habits
Your thoughts and emotions
The extent to which you carry your past along with you into the present
The biggest of the three — and often the one shaping the others beneath the surface — is the extent to which we carry unresolved experiences, emotional wounds, conditioning, fears, and protective patterns from the past into the present.
As a teenager and 20-something, I thought happiness was mostly about becoming more positive, changing my thoughts, fixing my habits, or trying harder to become the person I wanted to be. But over time, both personally and through working with others, I began realizing that many of the thoughts, emotional reactions, insecurities, coping strategies, relationship patterns, and behaviors that most interfere with our well-being are often connected to experiences, conditioning, emotional wounds, and adaptations we carry beneath the surface.
Not because we’re broken, but because human beings are shaped by what we live through.
We’ve all been through some sh*t. And unless we become more aware of the ways those experiences shaped us, many of the beliefs, fears, emotional reactions, coping strategies, relationship patterns, and protective responses we developed can continue repeating themselves automatically in our lives.
And while healing doesn’t suddenly make us immune to pain, grief, uncertainty, stress, disappointment, or being human, it can deeply change the way we relate to ourselves, to others, and to life.
For many people, a greater sense of happiness, peace, freedom, self-trust, connection, and emotional well-being are deeply connected to the awareness, honesty, compassion, support, healing, and self-understanding that they’re able to develop over time. Not all at once, not perfectly, and definitely not because life suddenly becomes easy. But because we slowly begin understanding ourselves more deeply instead of endlessly fighting ourselves from the surface.
Healing, growth, self-understanding, and greater happiness rarely happen all at once. More often, they unfold gradually through awareness, honesty, support, practice, reflection, connection, and the many small moments where we slowly begin relating to ourselves and our lives differently over time. And though life will always include challenges, pain, uncertainty, and change, many people do find that healing creates more space for genuine joy, connection, peace, self-trust, meaning, and aliveness along the way.
